If you haven't already seen it, here's my coverage of Sony's Playstation 3 announcement today. I wrote the story while sitting in Sony's press conference, so it was a bit rushed but I wanted to post some of my additional thoughts that didn't make it into the first article.
Let me start first with the design; to me, the Xbox 360 is very Apple-like while the PS3 is very clearly a Sony product. Personally I prefer the looks of the Xbox 360, but the PS3 doesn't look bad at all in real life.
Although I've yet to use it, the PS3's controller scares me. I'm going to try my hands at it this week, but I really have no idea where that design came from.
The demos on the PS3 were absolutely *amazing*. I wouldn't call them "movie-quality" yet, but the things I saw came very close. Words really can't describe, the demos just looked amazing.
Virtually all of the games/demos on the PS3 had some degree of aliasing, some were unacceptably bad for a console with this sort of power. Don't get me wrong, about 95% of the games looked great, but those that had aliasing looked great...with jaggies. I'm not talking PS2 level of aliasing, but far too much aliasing for this level of hardware.
Without a doubt, ATI and NVIDIA are on very diverging paths with these two consoles. ATI went with a strictly unified memory architecture while NVIDIA used a combination of local graphics memory and GPU addressable system memory. ATI is backing their unified shader architecture, while NVIDIA doesn't appear to have embraced that on the hardware side. I will know more about ATI's GPU later this week, so stay tuned.
The dual HD output feature of the PS3 is very interesting; I'm not sure how many folks will take advantage of the 32:9 aspect ratio mode. I'm wondering whether this feature was put in to support sending different content to separate TVs (e.g. stream video to one display while gaming in another). Then again, I'm not sure how many people have that many HDTVs within close proximity of each other.
Sony clearly wants the PS3 to be much more of a media center style device. The demos weren't only about games, they were about decoding HD streams, navigating through video and picture content, they were about the entire picture. With built in blu-ray, I think the PS3 will have a huge advantage over the Xbox 360 as it should be able to act as a HD-DVD video player as well as a game console.
The 1080p output of the PS3 isn't that big of a deal for me. Given that basically the entire installed base of HDTVs right now only support 1080i, I seriously doubt we'll see a push to 1080p only all that quickly. That being said, I don't doubt that there will be an obvious difference between 1080p and 720p games. Given that it is essentially a resolution change, I see no reason for all developers to offer both 1080p and 720p options in PS3 games unless there are frame rate limitations. I did notice that some demos played much smoother than others, but I think it is far too early to make any calls on performance a full year before the console's release.
I'd say that Sony has the more powerful CPU on paper, but I'm curious to see how much of that gets taken advantage of in the real world. Difficulty of programming aside, the fact of the matter is that console development houses are very much of the write once, compile many mindset. Given the similarity of the Xbox 360's cores to the PS3's PPE, I'm afraid that the array of SPEs may go relatively untapped on the PS3.
From the very start I felt that Sony couldn't possibly bring the Cell to market in the PS3 as a 90nm chip. Disabling one SPE is a particularly interesting move, but one that makes a lot of sense. And the loss of a single SPE isn't a huge deal as I don't foresee the PS3 really being bound by the number of threads its SPE array can execute.
Overall, the PS3 looks to me to be the more complete package. The hardware is a bit more complete than Xbox 360, but at the same time given that it won't launch for another 6+ months after the 360 launches I'm not too surprised. Sony didn't really play up a competitor to Xbox Live, although it is very clear that the PS3 will be a net-enabled box. I have a feeling that Microsoft may bring to the table a much more complete on-line play package, while Sony brings a more powerful, more complete console.
Sony's strength with the PS2 has always been its game library, which I think will continue to be a strength with the PS3 (especially with full backwards compatibility all the way back to PS1). It's just that this time around, Microsoft appears to have a much stronger game library than with the original Xbox - and it's that key difference that will make the 360 and the PS3 worthy competitors.
I will be reporting from the show all week, but for now it's time to enjoy 24 a full 3 hours later than I normally would - how do you west coast folks do it? :)
Take care.
Let me start first with the design; to me, the Xbox 360 is very Apple-like while the PS3 is very clearly a Sony product. Personally I prefer the looks of the Xbox 360, but the PS3 doesn't look bad at all in real life.
Although I've yet to use it, the PS3's controller scares me. I'm going to try my hands at it this week, but I really have no idea where that design came from.
The demos on the PS3 were absolutely *amazing*. I wouldn't call them "movie-quality" yet, but the things I saw came very close. Words really can't describe, the demos just looked amazing.
Virtually all of the games/demos on the PS3 had some degree of aliasing, some were unacceptably bad for a console with this sort of power. Don't get me wrong, about 95% of the games looked great, but those that had aliasing looked great...with jaggies. I'm not talking PS2 level of aliasing, but far too much aliasing for this level of hardware.
Without a doubt, ATI and NVIDIA are on very diverging paths with these two consoles. ATI went with a strictly unified memory architecture while NVIDIA used a combination of local graphics memory and GPU addressable system memory. ATI is backing their unified shader architecture, while NVIDIA doesn't appear to have embraced that on the hardware side. I will know more about ATI's GPU later this week, so stay tuned.
The dual HD output feature of the PS3 is very interesting; I'm not sure how many folks will take advantage of the 32:9 aspect ratio mode. I'm wondering whether this feature was put in to support sending different content to separate TVs (e.g. stream video to one display while gaming in another). Then again, I'm not sure how many people have that many HDTVs within close proximity of each other.
Sony clearly wants the PS3 to be much more of a media center style device. The demos weren't only about games, they were about decoding HD streams, navigating through video and picture content, they were about the entire picture. With built in blu-ray, I think the PS3 will have a huge advantage over the Xbox 360 as it should be able to act as a HD-DVD video player as well as a game console.
The 1080p output of the PS3 isn't that big of a deal for me. Given that basically the entire installed base of HDTVs right now only support 1080i, I seriously doubt we'll see a push to 1080p only all that quickly. That being said, I don't doubt that there will be an obvious difference between 1080p and 720p games. Given that it is essentially a resolution change, I see no reason for all developers to offer both 1080p and 720p options in PS3 games unless there are frame rate limitations. I did notice that some demos played much smoother than others, but I think it is far too early to make any calls on performance a full year before the console's release.
I'd say that Sony has the more powerful CPU on paper, but I'm curious to see how much of that gets taken advantage of in the real world. Difficulty of programming aside, the fact of the matter is that console development houses are very much of the write once, compile many mindset. Given the similarity of the Xbox 360's cores to the PS3's PPE, I'm afraid that the array of SPEs may go relatively untapped on the PS3.
From the very start I felt that Sony couldn't possibly bring the Cell to market in the PS3 as a 90nm chip. Disabling one SPE is a particularly interesting move, but one that makes a lot of sense. And the loss of a single SPE isn't a huge deal as I don't foresee the PS3 really being bound by the number of threads its SPE array can execute.
Overall, the PS3 looks to me to be the more complete package. The hardware is a bit more complete than Xbox 360, but at the same time given that it won't launch for another 6+ months after the 360 launches I'm not too surprised. Sony didn't really play up a competitor to Xbox Live, although it is very clear that the PS3 will be a net-enabled box. I have a feeling that Microsoft may bring to the table a much more complete on-line play package, while Sony brings a more powerful, more complete console.
Sony's strength with the PS2 has always been its game library, which I think will continue to be a strength with the PS3 (especially with full backwards compatibility all the way back to PS1). It's just that this time around, Microsoft appears to have a much stronger game library than with the original Xbox - and it's that key difference that will make the 360 and the PS3 worthy competitors.
I will be reporting from the show all week, but for now it's time to enjoy 24 a full 3 hours later than I normally would - how do you west coast folks do it? :)
Take care.
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Clauzii - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
AND - I really don´t understand all the talk about the PS3 being more difficult than the XBox360 (Did they steal that name from CNNs design360?? HaHa...) to program.Actually I can see one SPE running Physics Code, another running the Sounds, a third doing Team 1, a fourth Team 2, and so on... Imagine!!!!
And also the XBoxer can do some simultanious stuff, but it does not have 7 specialized calculation engines at 128bit EACH. PERIOD!
Fish - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
Dom where are you from Mars? When Xbox came out its graphics were not better than any PC. Read some reviews and forurms. I guess you have never played an Xbox game and then switched over the the PC version. There is a big difference in the visual quality on a PC. I can't stand to play games on the Xbox because they look fuzzy. Even if I go back to my Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 running on my AMD 450 chip I got better picture quality on my monitor than you can get on a TV.Now if you want to spend 3000 buck on a HDTV with these new systems then ok sure they will look good maybe even better but the jury is still out on that atleast until 2006.Also you need to worry about burn in with some of those TVs using those consoles on plasma and LCD and projection TV's.In the mean time intell and AMD are producing dual core CPUS, the DDR memory is getting faster and so are the video cards. We shall see how much this thing costs when it comes out. I remember the Xbox costing about 500 when it first came out. My whole point about my video card is that it was an upgrade to an existing system which is cost effective. Sure it cost me 200 bucks but at 1200X1280 res you can't beat it. If I look back to 2001 when the Xbox came out I see the Radeon 8500 and the Geforce 3 and I can say with confidence that they produced much better graphics than the Xbox. I know the console and the computer are two different animals and there are advantages to both. But from a person that has owned a number of consoles over the years (more than I would like to admit) At this point and time you can't beat the graphics on a PC.Clauzii - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
#67: No - not like two 6800s in SLI-mode (which´ll never reach the double power of one card anyway) BUT ACTUALLY faster than the double rendering power of One 6800U...Hmm - TV does not look that bad, does it?????
I´d say NO current graphics card, even at a TVs low approx. 800x600 resolution, is capable of anything close to rendering the picture TV-Movie-like ....
Anonymous - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
Have I missed something or has all the Console fanboys not ever seen Farcry's graphics? I have yet to see another game that can even match Farcry's graphics. And looking from the Demos on the consoles I can tell you Farcry is many times better looking, and guess what it's for the PC and not for a console and probably never will be.Shawn - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
Be carefull of what the specs say. Sony has been notorious for creating hardware that has bottlenecks in them, therefore allowing competent developers to get better over the life of the machine. The sony hardware makes sence as does microsoft for their layout.Sony claims to have 300m tannies in their processor in which a lot of that is cache. Also is the 8th redundant core included in this count?. At this count it would seem the the 7 cores are very small. However would you say that a PowerPC 604 running at 3.2 gigs with a decent branch prediction be powerful? It wouldn't have a hgh transistor count.
Nvidia was right to separate the graphics from main memory as the data request from 8 cores could slow down response times.
Microsofts 3 CPU system and shared memory architechure would seem to be a more accessible system to code. I expect that each core is more powerful than a PS3 core. IBM must have related the advantages an disadvantage of each system to both microsoft and sony.
I think that Microsofts hardware is easier to develop (due to it's simpler layout), so at the start the hardware will show promising results. I think this is a smart move by Microsoft as once GPU fillrate and CPU power has been fully unitilised, the developer will tantilise people with special effects through prefecting the use of the programmable vector and shader units.
Bottom line is that the GPUs will be the decider of these architectures. Nvida and ATI are both neck and neck companies in terms of GPU performance. Nvida is better at producing feature rich GPUs and ATI GPUs are generally better on paper but had poor driver support. This will not be as big as a problem for ATI on consoles as the APIs are custom.
Both architectures are scalable as you can add more cpu cores or make each core more powerful. Also the graphic companies double performance every 18 months, while maintaining backwards compatibility. This thorectically means that by the time the next console is due, ATI and Nvidia should have GPUs that are 16 - 20 times more powerfuland CPU cores to match than the ones going into the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Room for thought anyone?
PS. What the hell was Sony thinking with those controllers? Are either controllers feature vibration?
Anonymous - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
A world without Relgion, Peacefull?Theone - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
Yeah he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.I've never got an answer to this question.
Why when suicide bombers kill loads of ppl, and they say that cause they've asked to be forgiven there sins.
What kind of god would let them into heaven if such a place exists.
If u kill anyone, Down is the only way you'll be going.
Dom - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
#67Others have been over this. Computers are geared for entirely different purposes than consoles. When Xbox came out it killed the graphics of any PC. When the next generation console's come out they will do the same - and now the resolution differences you talked about won't exist. We'll have full screen HD resolution gaming. Sure you need to upgrade your TV but this is new technology, and won't ONLY benifit your gaming experience.
"And no way do you pay 2000 for a computer only a dork would do that. You can put a budget gaming machine together for like 500 bucks and the graphics eat the console alive."
Ummm... not when xbox or ps2 was launched you couldn't. Even in the PC you yourself claim to own (the "budget" 2500+ with a 6800 GPU) - that has a graphics card costing more than half the price of an xbox at launch, and most likely more than half the price of the next-gen xbox360.
"Sony said that their graphics system is equal to two 6800 Ultras running on SLI well how much do you think that is gonna cost you?"
Not as much as even one 6800 ultra ALONE costs right now. I can't see them charging $450 for a console.
Fizzle - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
Well a computer has much better graphics than a console. MUCH BETTER! Ok Poo bad investment is a console! You can upgrade computers and they give you more years of enjoyment. As prices come down you can up grade much cheaper. And no way do you pay 2000 for a computer only a dork would do that. You can put a budget gaming machine together for like 500 bucks and the graphics eat the console alive. Example DOOM III on the colsole graphics will make your eyes bleed. Play it on a computer with just standard graphics and they are much better than a console. What kind of res do you get on a TV? 400x600?? or worse. I get 1280x1200 on my computer screen with AA and AF enabled and that is with a budget 2500+ amd system and 6800 graphics card and I still have room to upgrade. Sony said that their graphics system is equal to two 6800 Ultras running on SLI well how much do you think that is gonna cost you?And lets say consloes finally did catch up with the computers well if you want the best picture on your tv you will need a high definition TV or something that can equal a good monitor. HOW MUCH IS THAT GONNA COST YOU! Much more than a computer ever will! We shall see. Also computer games are cheaper and their prices drop sooner. Also you can add mods to them. And a lot of games are free! Etc. Etc. Etc. You get what you pay for!Yasu - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - link
Bahhh... computer games are only RTS and FPS i really like RTS but i do like another kid of games too thats why you should buy a VideoGame to play Devil May Cry, Dead or Alive and other, wake up people, games arent just HL2 The Sims and Doom :pfor god sake!